1. Field of the Invention
Example embodiments relate to subsystem architecture for providing support services for software applications such as medical and financial applications.
2. Description of the Related Art
Generally, software applications used by various businesses and/or institutions may require and/or benefit from an infrastructure providing various information technology (IT) services such as logging, auditing, utilization, installation, software distribution, licensing, security, online help, configuration, monitoring, diagnostics, life cycle management, tracing, session management and context management. Conventional solutions for providing this infrastructure and/or the above mentioned IT services involve collecting a set of the required or requested IT services for each of the various different applications involved in a system or being run by a business and/or institution. However, the IT services for the various different applications are generally not related to each other and/or consistent from one software application to another software application, which may be used by the common business and/or institution.
The different IT services may be provided by or produced from different third party vendors and may be implemented “straight out of the box,” i.e., the service is not customized or adjusted for the specific software application using the service. As such, there is not a homogenous and systematic deployment of an infrastructure providing IT services in the above-described conventional solution. At least in part because there is not a systematic approach or pattern for providing services to the different software applications, the management and monitoring of the infrastructure and related services are not easily provided.
Further, providing different IT services created by different third party vendors, which may be implemented straight out of the box may also cause other detrimental effects. In particular, the specific operations of an IT service provided straight out of the box is not always known. Accordingly, the coupling between the IT service and the serviced software application has an effect on the service and may also have an effect on one or more other software applications communicating with the serviced application. Stated differently, the straight out of the box IT service may indirectly couple the serviced software application with one or more other software applications communicating with the serviced application.
One conventional approach attempting to address some of the above issues is to provide a single product or software application that superimposes a homogeneous solution on top of all of the various different software applications requiring or requesting IT services. In particular, a common product will be used to manage all of the services required by the different software applications. Unfortunately, this solution essentially moves the integration point of the various different applications having a common set of required IT services into the various different software applications. However, the various different software applications generally have different purposes and the inclusion of this common product may detrimentally affect the performance of the various different software applications. Further, because a homogenous solution is integrated into all of the various different software applications, the applications are now dependent on monolithic middleware, which may hamper the various different software applications. For example, the various different software applications may have different product life-cycles and thus, the homogeneous solution may not take into account the different life-cycles of the different software applications.
As described above, conventional solutions for providing various IT services may have a detrimental effect on the performance of the software applications of a business and/or institution. Further, the conventional solutions may have a detrimental effect on the technical coupling between the software applications of a business and/or institution.